In Ecology of a Cracker Childhood Janisse Ray combines in brutal honesty the history of her “cracker” family with the environmental legacy of the Southeast United States. Whether she is sharing details about the Longleaf Pine ecosystems or details about her childhood spent in rural isolation, they are shocking: of the estimated 85-156 million acres of original longleaf forests that spanned Virginia to Florida and west past the Mississippi, only 2 million acres remain; of the remaining 2 million acres, only 10,000 virgin acres were spared the axe, an appalling 0.000001 of pre-Columbian cover; a childhood habit of bed-wetting as a result of her father's paranoiac fear; the misspelling of her very own name on her birth certificate because the nurse approximated a mispronunciation by her toddler sister-Janneice instead of Janice. Such heartfelt candor has a way of drawing the reader into Ray's world, and her subtle style of writing, like the ever moving hands of a snake charmer, keeps the reader focused on the instrument of her ideas.
Landscape and culture are so closely related that it is often difficult to elucidate exactly how they intermingle. Similar to the eternal double helix that contains the mystery of both human body and human spirit, even great authors struggle to sort through the jumble of memory and emotion. But Ray's writing conveys a profound understanding of this interplay. By juxtaposing elements from her personal history with elements of the natural history of the land, she demonstrates connections that might otherwise go unnoticed. For example, the second chapter, “Below the Fall Line”, chronicles the brief but thorough deforestation of the Longleaf forests by the early settlers, her ancestors. It was so thorough, in fact, that Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Virginia no longer know the Longleafs, and Mississippi, Alabama and North Carolina know less than 1,000 acres combined. Ironically, of the remaining 10,000 virgin acres in Georgia and Florida, half belong to Elgins Air Force Base and another third are held by a private hunting plantation. Ray describes it best in a one word paragraph: “Apocalyptic”.
The next chapter is titled “Shame”. Here Ray discusses not the shame of the environmental legacy, but her shame of growing up shoeless and in poverty, isolated both physically by the remote location of her family's junkyard abode and socially by her father's manic fear of strangers, fundamentalist religious beliefs, and strict denial of modernity. Consequently, “It didn't take many years to realize that I was a southerner, a slow, dumb, redneck hick, a hayseed, inbred and racist” and “It has taken a decade to whip the shame, to mispronounce words and shun grammar when mispronunciation and misspeaking are part of my dialect, to own the bad blood.” By placing these chapters, one environmental, one personal, in sequence allows the reader to truly feel the depth of her conclusion: “What I come from has made me who I am.”
The narrative continues in the same fashion. In “Built by Fire”, Ray describes the co-evolution of the Longleaf Pines with fire in mythic prose reminiscent of indigenous folktales and follows it with an equally fantastic account of her grandfather, Charlie Joe Ray, legendary fisherman, 'coon hunter, and pugilist. “Clearcut”, a description of the violent opening of the land, is followed by “How the Heart Opens”, “Forest Beloved” explains the many players and relationships in the Longleaf Pine ecosystem before shifting to “Junkyard”, a vivid portrayal of her familial environment, and so on.
Another stylistic technique that endears Ray to the reader is her use of affectionate colloquialisms such as “Daddy” and “Mama” rather than the formal “my father” or “my mother”. In essence, this creates a shared affection with the reader, which, as Ray's childhood story unfolds, conveys the sensation that it is also the reader's story that is unfolding. Coupling this technique with her impassioned account of the destruction of the Longleaf Pine forests, her struggle to protect these devastated ecosystems is then everybody's fight.
Though I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir and think it would make a wonderful addition to any secondary school course exploring the Southeast United States, environmental issues--specifically the relationship between poverty and the treatment of the environment and the affect of culture on attitudes towards the environment--or creative writing, there is one important criticism that demands attention. In all of her accounts, Ray barely acknowledges the Creek Indians, whose removal precluded the arrival of her own ancestors and the subsequent deforestation of the Longleaf Pine forests.
In total, she writes a mere three sentences about the Creek spread across the 285 pages of text. The first instance dispassionately states “In January of 1818 on the Flint River, the Creek Indians, having been bloodily defeated by Andrew Jackson in their 1813-14 rebellion against the encroachment of whites, ceded a tract of land below the Altamaha to Georgia” and then moves straight on to the crackers moving in. Several chapters later, Ray recalls “imagining we were Indians” while playing with her siblings at her grandmother's house. And finally, she mentions passing an ancient Creek encampment at the confluence of two rivers while on a rafting trip, but then spends most of the paragraph discussing the native fish of the river! Ironically, the topic of a chapter titled “Native Genius” is her father's savant-like ability to 'take the materials and technology at hand and solve complex problems”.
So, my question is this: Why does Ray deliberately neglect to tell of the Native peoples, who called themselves the Muskogee, who were so ruthlessly pushed out of their native lands? Perhaps she was afraid that such a discussion would take too long, or that it would detract from her own story and cause, or perhaps she simply shares the denial so many Americans live in. Regardless, its omission seriously detracts from the effectiveness of her message. Even from a non-anthropocentric viewpoint it is impossible to dismiss one of the more egregious examples of Indian resettlement. If the Muskogee had been non-human, she surely would have bemoaned their loss just as she did the endangered and threatened populations of gopher tortoises, red-cockaded woodpeckers and Longleaf Pines. Are we really to come running to the defense of trees and animals without considering the human populations who essentially suffered a “local extinction”? Even a deep ecologist would recognize that an important member of the natural community, perhaps even a “keystone species” of culture, had been driven out and replaced by an invasive one.
With this said, Milkweed Edition's goal to highlight “the ways natural and human communities connect-by shared rivers, forests, basins, mountain ranges, cities, and so on-while also acting as a specific guide for the protection of these landscapes” is firmly achieved in Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Though it may not paint the entire picture, it paints an important picture that should be shared with the rest of the world.
Review ©2005 by Justin Symington and RSiSS
Palmer Trinity School
Miami, Florida